Chapter 1 posed a broad theoretical question: what accounts for the comparative success and failure of state-building efforts on the South American continent? Empirically, long-run South American state-building outcomes provide a series of paradoxical results that must be accommodated in any viable answer to this question. First, the strongest of state institutions emerged in some of the most unlikely of settings: the impoverished, colonial backwaters of Chile and Uruguay. At the same time, the wealthier colonial centers of Peru and Argentina (and Mexico in the north), despite higher levels of human capital (and thus larger pools of literate, skilled individuals available to staff their bureaucratic structures) and a legacy of much deeper institutional development from the era of Spanish colonialism, ultimately produced much less successful public administrations. While Argentina initially, if belatedly, began the development of strong national institutions at the end of the nineteenth century, by the 1940s, institutional development had devolved into a near-irreconcilable conflict over the proper scope and role of the state that left its institutions weak and subject to persistent cycles of populist expansion and antipopulist retrenchment. And despite a comparatively much higher level of economic development than the rest of the continent, and thus in principle more resources with which to build institutions and manage conflict, a durable institutional settlement was never achieved. Finally, Peru began its independent life as a weakly institutionalized state, characterized by administrative inefficacy and persistent civil conflict. And despite repeated efforts to alter the fundamental structure of its governmental institutions, it remained a continental laggard in this regard. This range of variation is quite typical of differences among the state administrative structures found in the late developing nations, and it begs critical questions as to what brings it about and why the relative differences tend to persist for long periods of time. It is to that task that this book now turns.